GREY GARDENS: THE MUSICAL The odd valor of Big and Little Edie and the poignancy of their shared dysfunction are enhanced by the score.

The East Hampton Board of Health would doubtless approve Grey Gardens: The Musical, since it comes minus the crapping cats, feral raccoons, and piles of garbage that form the supporting cast and unsanitary milieu of the famed documentary on which it's based. What the singing version of Grey Gardens, in its local premiere by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston (through June 6), has that David and Albert Maysles's 1975 peep into the lives of fallen American aristocrats Edith Bouvier Beale and her namesake daughter Edie does not is a flashback of a first act that underlines Big and Little Edie's connections to Camelot and a score, part period novelty, part haunting subtext, not borrowed from No, No, Nanette. What Spiro Veloudos's well-pitched production throws in are a couple of pretty uncanny replications of the eccentric, dysfunctional duo the Maysles brothers captured living amid memory, grievance, and squalor. Moreover, Leigh Barrett, who plays Big Edie in act one and the idiosyncratic Little Edie of the documentary in act two, sings better than either.

Composer Scott Frankel came up with the idea of turning Grey Gardens into a musical but at first didn't know how. The documentary, after all, is a plotless meander through a broken-down manse inhabited by a couple of broken-down broads eating cat food while talking like the Astors. The solution Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie hit on was to precede a second act based on the film with a first set 32 years earlier, before the 28-room Grey Gardens and its occupants had fallen into disrepair. And book writer Doug Wright (Pulitzer winner for I Am My Own Wife) ingeniously works not only the seeds of mother and daughter's recriminatory co-dependency but also dialogue lifted from the documentary into this Cole Porter–ish return to less addled, more affluent days.

The appetizer course goes on too long, given that most of the audience is watering at the mouth for the entrée, with Big Edie half-naked in her filthy bed and Little Edie unveiling the "revolutionary costumes" for which towel scarves are fastened with jeweled brooches and skirts are upended and pinned. But the prequel is nicely turned out, the occasion being the run-up to an engagement party that not only incorporates young Bouviers Jackie and Lee but also stretches history to betroth Little Edie (a spry, fetching Aimee Doherty) to Joe Kennedy, elder brother of JFK.

In the course of an East Hampton afternoon, as the narcissistic, bohemian mother conspires with George Gould Strong, the alcoholic accompanist about whom Big Edie rhapsodizes in the documentary, to turn her daughter's fête into a showcase for her own warbling, she's rejected by her starchy Wall Street spouse, her Teddy Roosevelt Republican of a dad, and even Gould, who in the poignant duet "Drift Away" intimates that his days as a kept piano player are at an end. Big Edie does manage to scare off Kennedy with a tale of scandal, and Little Edie announces more than once that she must get away from Grey Gardens and her symbiotic, parasitic connection to mom. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Old haunts It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that Blithe Spirit , that cocktail shaker full of dry martini and ectoplasmic mayhem, will amuse. Playwright Noël Coward diagnosed his own gift as a talent to do just that.

Trivial pursuit It's difficult to put on an awful performance of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest .

Myth understanding Trinity Repertory Company has been developing and is staging Shapeshifter , by Laura Schellhardt, which will have its world premiere May 1-31.

Lady of the Sea If all you know of the Aran Islands is the plays of Martin McDonagh, you probably think their populace is an untamed and violent lot.

Dynamic duo There are King Oedipus and his mom, there are Romeo and Juliet, and there are Oscar and Felix.

Hot ticket Here's a hot flash for you: dying is easy (in the theatrical sense of bombing onstage); producing a successful show is hard.

The Pirate Girl The economic downturn is such that we may eventually see pirate ships showing off the Jolly Roger around Narragansett Bay. When they do, you can bet that their favorite place to unwind after a long day Yo-ho-ho -ing will be a friendly fisherman's bar and restaurant on a quiet road off the main strip in Galilee.

Berlin calling If you ask someone whether they've seen Cabaret , odds are the answer will be yes. Ask Curt Columbus, and the answer is likely to be: Which one? Sitting in the upstairs theater of Trinity Repertory Company, where their production runs through October 11, the artistic director rattled off a chronology as lengthy as a convoluted German sentence.

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